Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

The Idiocy of "Environmental Justice"

By Alan
Caruba

A news
item in late June caught my eye. It was in the Washington Free Beacon and the
headline was “EPA spends $1.6 million on hotel for ‘Environmental Justice’
conference.”

The event
will occur in the fall and the location is the Renaissance Arlington Capital
View Hotel.

By its own
description, it is located “Just one mile from the Ronald Reagan Washington
National Airport, this Arlington hotel features a chic lobby and indoor
swimming pool. Rooms come with 37’’ HDTVs and plug-in connectivity panels.” A
room for one night will cost approximately $349. The EPA is booking 195 of them
for 24 nights!

The
environmental movement began as the conservation movement. Its early leaders
were concerned about preserving our great forests and other landmarks.
President Teddy Roosevelt was enthusiastic about that and used his powers to
initiate national parks and reserves. These days, however, Clinton and Obama
used those same powers to close off access to vast energy reserves.

So what is
“environmental justice”?According to
the EPA, it is “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people
regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the
development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws,
regulations, and policies.” In other words, it is another justification for the
EPA’s existence.

But
there’s more. “It will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of
protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the
decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn,
and work.” Aside from the fact that you can attend the next zoning board
meeting in your town or city, this is just sheer rubbish.

By what
level of insanity can the EPA achieve the “same degree of protection from
environmental and health hazards…”? Can it protect Midwesterners from
tornadoes? The Gulf and East Coasts from hurricanes? What is its policy
regarding blizzards in the winter or droughts in the summer?

None of
this has anything to do with “justice.”

How does
the EPA propose to ensure that “everyone enjoys the same degree of protection”?
Answer: It cannot. So, instead, it devotes its time to punishing a landowner
who gets local permission to build a pond on his farm, but who did not also
check in with the Corps of Engineers.

On July 2,
the EPA put a notice in the Federal Register asserting the right to “garnish
non-federal wages to collect delinquent non-tax debts own the United States without first obtaining a court order.” (
Emphasis added) That is a definition of tyranny and lawlessness that defies the
protections afforded by the Constitution.

Along with
the global warming hoax, the term “environmental justice” comes out of the
early 1980s where the liberal loonies saw it as a new social movement to
ensure, according to Wikipedia, “the fair distribution of environmental
benefits and burdens.”

As John F.
Kennedy famously said, “Life is not fair.” Everyone’s life depends in part on
the cold reality of numerous factors over which they had or have no control,
and choices they made regarding their lives.

Some might
think that EPA’s spending $1.6 million on luxurious hotel rooms where their
“Environmental Justice” conference is held is “unfair”, especially if the cost
of attending is being picked up by the taxpayers.

Again,
Wikipedia: “Environmental justice advocates frequently make the argument that
minority populations disproportionally undertake or are subjected to
environmentally hazardous activities because they have few economic
alternatives and/or are not fully away of the risks involved.”

The Green
ideology of environmentalists blinds them to reality and the reality is that we
are all born into different levels of wealth, different lifestyles, and
different challenges, but we are all born in a nation where studying hard in
school, hard work and a positive outlook can help us achieve as much as we aspire
to. America is the home of millions of success stories.

The environment
has nothing to do with social issues of poverty, race, or sex with which Greens
want to associate it.

Joseph
Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, opened its ninth International
Conference on Climate Change earlier this week by noting that “In Fiscal Year
2013, the U.S. federal government spent $22.5 billion on ‘global warming.’ It
spent $200 billion over the past twenty years. By one estimate the world is spending
$1 billion a DAY on projects that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for global
warming alarmism.”

When one
contemplates how such an exorbitant expenditure could have funded the building
and repair of U.S. highways and bridges, how it could help equip our nation’s
military, or how it could help provide housing for the poor, the global
warming/climate change agenda of the EPA and other U.S. agencies is an
obscenity.

The EPA
should be eliminated and its functions returned to the individual states, all
of which have their own departments of environmental protection. At the very
least, we would save billions.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.